JOHN: What do those feel like?
MINNIE: Ever walk in arctic moss?
He replied with a smiley face and resumed his silence.
Sometimes conversing with him hurt. Since his injuries, John had become this pleasant, agreeable stranger. It was as though he knew he was dying and saw life through cheerful new eyes. Pain meds may have had something to do with it, but regardless, there was little evidence of the man she’d often despised, and so she frequently found herself assailed with guilt. Perhaps this was who he’d always been. Maybe she’d been such a jealous, egotistical, competitive jerk that she’d never seen the real him.
She reached the ground, unholstered her multiweapon, and activated route guidance. The transparent red line appeared before her, overlaying the terrain. Just ahead, the planned path led around a large boulder, continuing beyond the obstruction as a dashed line. Minnie cracked her visor open to allow in outside air and she broke into a jog.
Running felt good. She noticed her energy level increasing the more time she spent outside the oppressive cavern. In the beginning, the limitations of the cave occasionally provided comfort, like tightly swaddling a newborn that had spent its first nine months in a room no bigger than its body. Hynka aside, the idea of the surface’s unfamiliar and boundless expanse had felt wholly unsafe. But after several days, even with the calorie bars and supplements, Minnie had noticed a growing fatigue weighing on her in the cave. She’d felt lazy and unmotivated, useless and depressed. In there, her only consistent drive was handling John’s medical needs.
Fresh air, despite the higher nitrogen level, had made all the difference.
One of Epsy’s rodentia popped out of a hole just in front of her before startling and disappearing just as quickly. Biologically, the Hynkas’ favorite prey were closer to birds, their coats consisting of very fine, downy feather structures like young chicks, but they were millions of years from flight, if that’s where they were headed. For now, they behaved much like timid squirrels or rabbits, and the crew fondly referred to them as bunnies. Though no one ever put it in an M (as it’d violate conversation topic rules), curiosity abounded on whether or not, this far from Earth, an animal would still “taste like chicken.”
As cute as they were, Minnie planned to bring one back for supper. She’d settle the chicken question, once and for all. And this one seemed as appropriate a candidate as any other. She posted over its hole, spun off a length of trapping wire, and fed it into the burrow. When it felt like it reached the end, she snipped the wire, wrapped the ends around her MW’s stun posts, and cranked up the voltage. She pulled the trigger. A sad, muffled peep let her know her very first hunt had been successful.
Lying prone in the soil, Minnie stretched her arm into the hole, feeling around for her prize. No such luck. After a quick scan through the soil for biomagnetic waves, she dug around to widen the entrance. Quite a few flatworms were exposed in the process, and, unsure if they were related to the ones from the cave, she disdainfully flung them away. Finally, upon reaching and extracting the electrocuted bunny carcass, Minnie stood up and inspected herself for worms or anything else that might have attached itself to her suit. All clear.
She unzipped a storage pocket, pulled out the crumpled bag attached within, stuffed in the bunny, and sealed it up.
As she continued on to the EV site, she felt a strange mix of pride and guilt about the limp animal bouncing on her thigh. Hooray for a successful first hunt, but it was almost as though she’d killed a puppy.
JOHN: Good job with the rodent.
MINNIE: I forgot you were there. Thank you, but shush.
He resent her the sealed lips.
There weren’t many things on Epsy that reminded her of home. The forests were dominated by teal, orange, and yellow megafungi, and the lack of flying insects limited the number of aesthetically Earthlike plants to a few remote locations. But bunnies reminded Minnie of home, and the fact that she’d have to go on killing and eating them reemphasized the fact that she’d never again be at home. A real hunter would probably feel the opposite.
The red guide line ended beyond a dense thicket of green wafer fungi, like the underside of a portabella mushroom, turned on its side and shooting up from the soil like rows of wavy walls. She could have slipped between them as the guide line suggested, but wasn’t keen on being coated in spores.
Instead, she took the long way around, observing familiar terrain and the first remains of dead Hynka. If she had more time, a close inspection of a cadaver could prove useful, but her mission was comms. She passed a worm-riddled behemoth and disregarded the bones of several others. But as she came upon the EV site, trampled and littered with more Hynka bones than EV scraps, she noticed a few interesting things.
The EV was gone.
All of the Hynka remains but a few were practically scoured of meat. The intact ones had been left to the worms and fungus—the Hynka hadn’t eaten the individuals she and John had killed.
A not-so-subtle stampede trail led east through trampled foliage; a telltale track marked the middle where the EV had been rolled. The Hynka had taken a prize.
Pieces of small components littered the entire area, many pressed into the soil beneath massive footprints.
Minnie squatted over a little blue component she recognized from the station’s rebreathers. In the EVs, these things were mounted deep inside the hull behind the seats, protected along with all of the other life support-related gear. The Hynka must have ripped the inside of the pod to shreds.
JOHN: Sorry, but what is that?
MINNIE: CO2 biscuit from the scrubbers.
She peered around the site, spotting hundreds of other tiny pieces, like hi-tech confetti.
JOHN: I’m sorry, Minerva.
MINNIE: It’s ok. I didn’t have high hopes.
JOHN: Are you going to try to go after it?
MINNIE: Just looking around here, it’s highly doubtful that any kind of comms gear survived their rage dissection.
JOHN: What about the beacon?
Again with the beacon?
He seemed otherwise lucid, but strange how his memory repeatedly erased the bit about the EV beacon being dead.
MINNIE: Do you not remember us talking about the beacon? That’s twice in the past 20 mins.
JOHN: I remember it was out of range. Thought maybe since you were closer now… Shutting up.
Minnie sighed, feeling like she was once again being mean to a severely wounded man. She pulled out her multisensor. She looked directly at the screen so John could see it through her feed, and set the device to listen for emergency signals. The device immediately emitted the three-beep chirp of an affirmative. Range and coordinates of a beacon popped up on the screen.
What the hell?
MINNIE: You see this?
JOHN: I see.
JOHN: I’ll stop asking about the beacon now.
Minnie smirked. So a dash of the old John was still hanging around in that head.
She couldn’t believe it. Not only had just a few kilometers been the difference between sensing the beacon or not, but she was amazed that the emitter was still functional after all the abuse. Then again, they did make those things to survive pretty serious impacts.